I was grading a stack of student assignments — specifically, feedback on readings, which I make them do on the theory that it helps them prepare for discussions of the texts — when I ran across a particularly saddening passage in response to “The Multiculture,” an essay about Torontonian multiculturalism, which I’ll only paraphrase here: If I were a Torontonian, I would look at foreigners in two ways. In one way, I’d see them as invaders, because they would be speaking foreign languages and bringing foreign customs to my land. But I would also see them as bringing new life …
Month: October 2009
Nutters in Bloom, and Comments From Today, and a Song
Nutters: Wow, people on the internet are crazy. I’m not going to taunt Happy Fun Freak any more than to say that, despite temptation, except to note that when one knows absolutely nothing about a topic but insists on talking about it and pretending he does know about it, it’s absolutely clear to the people who do know something how little one actually knows. Comments: A few comments from today which need to be preserved, from a meeting on student presentation proposals, a chat with a professor about the Ministry of Education, and a chat with a teacher in another …
A “Sense of WTF?”
I’m one tiny little paragraph away from completing a draft of my paper which, well, I can’t quite call it the first draft. It’s more like draft v2.1. I wrote most of it once before, realized it sucked in structure and voice, restarted with a totally different voice but a similar (though subtly reworked) structure, and then filled in soe of the holes I’d left gaping in the first draft. I’ve edited so much of it already, though, that I anticipate only a half-day next week for editing, which means, once I finish this final paragraph, I’m free, free, free! …
Google Docs? Impossible!
I’m busy working on a paper that should be done in a couple of days — whew! — which is the main reason I haven’t been posting here. When I reformulate it into a “talk,” I post the contents here in some form or other. (Possibly with slides, possibly just the audio, I’m not sure.) Anyway, in the meantime, it struck me that back when I was an undergrad, I was talking with a computer science major about the way the Internet might change our thinking (and use) of software. At the time, I suggested that eventually we might be …
Banned in China: Your Assurance of Quality Content
The title of this post is a throwaway comment Bruce Sterling made in his lecture, “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole” (mp3, video with terrible audio), in the course of mentioning that most scientists who are able to do the scary stuff that frightens Bill Joy are unlikely to be willing to take up residence in the caves of Afghanistan or up in North Korea just to get the freedom to research things that have been banned by everyone else. It reminded me of a funny thing an ex-student in Beijing told me — this blog is blocked …